• 0 Posts
  • 66 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle
  • Well, that phone is a Xiaomi, not a Samsung (who had already made my shit list some years ago thanks to all their bloat), and the new ROM is just a bloat free MIUI, so from the same maker as the phone.

    And yeah, as somebody else mentioned, if the banking app stopped working it would be the bank losing me - it wouldn’t be the first time I changed banks because they pissed me off.

    Retail banking as a service is a commodity - they’re pretty much all the same - so sticking or not with a bank should be something one does based on cost and convenience and a banking app that doesn’t work on my phone reduces convenience.

    As it so happens my banking app works fine.

    That said, your alert can be important for other people and points one more reason to avoid Samsung like the plague.



  • Thanks in party to the spirit in Lemmy (thanks guys and gals) and getting pissed off at the ever more enshittification, I really went full-on on taking back control, and I don’t mean just changing my home PC (mainly used for Gaming) from Windows to Linux, but also replacing the TV Box that’s bundled with my ISP subscription (and will be changing ISP when the current contract is over) with my own Mini-PC with Lubunto and Kodi (which is also my Torrenting host with an always-on VPN and my home’s NAS) replacing the original Samsung Android (which had been bloated due to updates to the point of filling up all memory) of my aging tablet, with LineageOS and even doing the same on my brand new Smartphone.

    Granted, I’ve always had the spirit of avoiding “smarts” in stuff that doesn’t need it - like TVs - but now I went and as much as possible took back control on even the stuff that does need “smarts”.

    So far I’m quite happy with it all: I’ve maintained (improved, even, such as my Tablet now having more available memory) my level of Tech access whilst cutting of the ways in which companies exploited my time and patience for advertising money - I definitely feel I’m better now than before: a lot of things became more convenient and less restricted than they were before.

    Things are becoming really bad out there when it comes to treating customers as cattle to be milked and I reckon that the only future were Tech is actually a pleasure to use for users is for those people who take control back from the corps on all of their devices.


  • I was already a dev in a small IT consultancy by the end of the decade, and having ended up as “one of the guys you go to for web-based interfaces”, I did my bit pushing Linux as a solution, though I still had to use IIS on one or two projects (even had to use Oracle Web Application Server once), mainly because clients trusted Microsoft (basically any large software vendor, such as Microsoft, IBM or Oracle) but did not yet trust Linux.

    That’s why I noticed the difference that Red Hat with their Enterprise version and Support Plans did on the acceptability of Linux.



  • CRT monitors internally use an electron gun which just fires electrons at the phosporous screen (from, the back, obviously, and the whole assembly is one big vacuum chamber with the phosporous screen at the front and the electron gun at the back) using magnets to twist the eletcron stream left/right and up/down.

    In practice the way it was used was to point it to the start of a line were it would start moving to the other side, then after a few clock ticks start sending the line data and then after as many clock ticks as there were points on the line, stop for a few ticks and then swipe it to the start of the next line (and there was a wait period for this too).

    Back in those days, when configuring X you actually configured all this in a text file, low level (literally the clock frequency, total lines, total points per line, empty lines before sending data - top of the screen - and after sending data as well as OFF ticks from start of line before sending data and after sending data) for each resolution you wanted to have.

    All this let you defined your own resolutions and even shift the whole image horizontally or vertically to your hearts content (well, there were limitations on things like the min and max supported clock frequency of the monitor and such). All that freedom also meant that you could exceed the capabilities of the monitor and even break it.


  • In the early 90s all the “cool kids” (for a techie definition of “cool”, i.e. hackers) at my University (a Technical one in Portugal with all the best STEM degrees in the country) used Linux - it was actually a common thing for people to install it in the PCs of our shared computer room.

    Later in that decade it was already normal for it to be used in professional environments for anything serving web pages (static or dynamic) along with Apache: Windows + IIS already had a lower fraction of that Market than Linux + Apache.

    If I remember it correctly in the late 90s RedHat started providing their Enterprise Version with things like Support Contracts - so beloved by the Corporates who wanted guarantees that if their systems broke the supplier would fix them - which did a lot to boost Linux use on the backend for non-Tech but IT heavy industries.

    I would say this was the start of the trend that would ultimately result in Linux dominating on the server-side.


  • Aceticon@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldCasual reminder
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    23
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    4 days ago

    It looks a lot like in a way History is repeating itself: the Democrat Establishment in the US (who are a hard neoliberals, not lefties) fielded directly and without a Primary a guy like Biden who is less than in his prime and even supports an ethno-Fascist regime commiting Genocide (and, more importantly, is unwilling to walk back on that support even to improve his odds of winning against Trump, which is what we are being told is the most important thing in the World) all of which is making it far more likely that the Fascists will get power.

    There are vast contradictions between what we are being told is the danger of Trump getting elected and the DNC and Biden persistently making choices that increase the chances of Trump getting elected and not walking back on those.

    Surelly if “Stop Trump” is the most important thing in the World for them, the Democrat Establishment too would be walking towards the wishes of the electorate not just trying to push the electorate to do all the walking towards the wishes of the Democrat Establishment.









  • Not in the EU it doesn’t, unless they got the user to review that Agreement and agree before the sale took place.

    After the implicit contract which is the sale has been agreed to by both parties (the buyer gave the money, the seller took it), one of the parties can’t force the other party to agree to a new contract before they’re allowed to get the contractual benefits of the original contract (i.e. the buyer getting to use the product they bought, the seller getting to use the money they got).

    It doesn’t matter if the seller has such power de facto - legally they most definitelly can’t blackmail the buyer by denying them their side of the contractual rights they got in the Act of Sale by blocking their use of the product they bought until they agree to a new Agreement from the seller.


  • Real LifeTM is a Role-Playing Multiplayer Game with the best graphics resolution in the Industry.

    Sadly, it suffers from severe game play balance problems, most notably that most of game play time is spent in boring tasks which should’ve been simplified into just the core gameplay element for a better gaming experience, plus it’s heavy reliance on grinding, to the point that most players literally have to spend at least 8h per day in the game grinding merelly to not lose the game.

    And don’t get me started on it’s Pay To Play elements.


  • To add to both your posts, a pretty good general rule is: don’t confuse famous with knowledgeable.

    The only knowledge they’ve proven is of “how to become known in a specific domain”, which at least in social media is mainly about self-promotion (and more generally it’s about grifter skills) rather than specific domain knowledge.

    So yeah, the likes of Andrew Tate will do it by looking confident whilst telling tons of bullshit and plenty of female influencers will do it by looking good and showing some skin - they’re good at self-promotion online but that doesn’t mean they know shit about anything else.



  • Not really in a bolt tightenning domain, but I have done technical interviews for a lot of devs including junior ones, and them asking all those questions about the task is something I would consider a very good thing.

    At least in my domain the first step of doing a good job is figuring out exactly what needs to be done and in what conditions, so somebody who claims to have some experience who when faced with a somewhat open ended question like this just jumps into the How without first trying to figure out the details of the What is actually a bad sign (or they might just be nervous, so this by itself is not an absolute pass or fail thing).